I don't really see SquirrelFish as a factor in this, but certainly agree with the general sentiment. Yes, AppleScript may be more approachable for non-programmers, but Apple now has Automator for that purpose and fighting Javascript is a loosing battle anyway: Javascript will be the lingua franca for scripting purposes anywhere.

In recent days, new partial drafts for the upcoming ECMAScript specs have become available. Parts of the
ECMAScript 4 spec draft
were previously spread all over the email archives. Nice to have them compiled in one place. The
ECMAScript 3.1 spec draft
wasn't available at all before, as far as I'm aware.

Then take
the just released Mascara
Javascript 2 to Javascript 1 converter written in Python, run it using Jython on the Java Virtual Machine, and invoke it using Rhino inside of Helma, evaluating the results. Ok, now my head hurts.

SquirrelFish!
It's a new bytecode interpreter in Apple's JavaScriptCore
inspired by Lua
. While the switch to a bytecode interpreter brings Apple's Javascript engine more in line with the engines of Mozilla and Adobe, there are still some
different approaches in SquirrelFish compared
to the Tamarin based ActionMonkey project (which will replace SpiderMonkey in the future).

One likely scenario is that Adobe will include Screaming Monkey as part of a future Flash version to distribute it to virtually all IE browser users, making Javascript 2.0 a viable target platform for Web Applications in a reasonable amount of time.

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